David Adjaye's New Furniture for Knoll

London-based visionary, David Adjaye, with some of his pieces at Knoll’s Manhattan offices. Photo: Joshua McHugh

It takes great design to keep company with iconic midcentury furnishings. So, on the occasion of Knoll’s 75th anniversary, the firm decided to add to its pedigreed offerings by enlisting some of today’s top talents. Knoll’s latest collection comes courtesy of architect David Adjaye, the mind behind such significant projects as the Smithsonian’s forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. “When they said they wanted me to design a chair, I couldn’t really believe it,” recalls the London-based visionary, pictured (above) with some of his pieces at Knoll’s Manhattan offices (the line also includes a limited-edition cocktail table). AD sat down with Adjaye to learn more.

David Adjaye: These are the first production pieces I’ve ever done, so I wasn’t sure how to deal with the idea of a chair. But I realized it wasn’t just about making a product, it was about expressing my position—the materials, silhouettes, and forms that interest me. I was working on the Smithsonian at the time, so I took the building as a landscape and designed the pieces that I wanted to see there.

AD: Where do you imagine using the copper side chair [shown above]?

DA: That version was designed for the museum’s main dining room. It’s a riff on Victorian cast-iron garden furniture, which still looks great more than a century later. The copper will oxidize beautifully.

AD: Does the filigree reference anything?

DA: The skin of the museum is a translation of old Southern ironwork. For the chair I started with the same patterns but found they didn’t work with the structural forces of a seat. So we analyzed them and did an extraordinary amount of testing—bouncing a chair thousands of times on its side, really beating the hell out of it. I generated the pattern out of those conditions.